But that wasn’t quite all—not really. One additional course was possible. Walking in the path of my very private, psychopathic genie, acting on his impulse, I perhaps could follow up Hakala’s murder with a few more of my own.

It was a natural as ideas go, of course. Lust murders tend to run in bunches. Celeste had already set the pattern with nakedness and multiple stab wounds. And all the loyal kooks and crazies of our group, a lovely assortment of potential victims if I ever saw one, stood close at hand this very instant.

Who could guess that Celeste was my prime target?

Who’d know that first and foremost, I was out to silence her?

Shed enough blood, and my own role in this whole monstrous nightmare might very well be lost. I could end up the one man to survive the carnage, free at last of marriage and Celeste.

And if you came right down to it, what was one more murder to me? Or two, or three, or a dozen? Even if they caught me, they couldn’t hang me any higher.